Everything You Actually Need To Know About Emotional Abandonment
We may not realize that we’re feeling emotionally abandoned or that we did as a child. We may be unhappy, but can’t put our finger on what it is. People tend to think of abandonment as something physical, like neglect. They also may not realize that loss of physical closeness due to death, divorce, and illness is often felt as an emotional abandonment. However, emotional abandonment has nothing to do with proximity. It can happen when the other person is lying right beside us – when we can’t connect, and our emotional needs aren’t being met in the relationship.
Emotional Needs
Often we aren’t aware of our emotional needs and just feel that something’s missing. But we have many emotional needs in intimate relationships. Among other needs, we all need to be:
Heard
Understood
Nurtured
Appreciated
Valued
Accepted
Respected
Loved
and we have needs for:
Affection
Companionship
Consequently, if there is high conflict, abuse, addiction, or infidelity, these emotional needs go unmet. Sometimes, infidelity is a symptom of emotional abandonment in the relationship – by one or both partners. Additionally, addiction may be used to avoid closeness. If one partner is addicted, the other may feel neglected, because the addiction comes first and consumes the addict’s attention, preventing him or her from being present. Addiction includes a process addictions, such as to work or gambling.
Causes of Emotional Abandonment
Yet even in a healthy relationship, there are periods, days, and even moments of emotional abandonment that may be caused by:
Withholding communication or affection
External stressors, including the demands of parenting
Illness
Insufficient time spent together, sometimes due to work
Lack of mutual interests
Self-centeredness and preoccupation
Lack of healthy communication
Resentment that doesn’t get resolved
Fear of intimacy
When couples don’t share common interests or work/sleep schedules, one or both may feel abandoned. They have to make an extra effort to spend time talking about their experiences and intimate feelings with each other to keep the relationship fresh and alive.
More harmful are unhealthy communication patterns that may have developed, where one or both partners doesn’t share openly, listen with respect, and respond with interest to the other. When we feel ignored or that our partner doesn’t understand or care about what we’re communicating, then there’s a chance that eventually we stop talking to him or her. Walls begin to build and we can begin living separate lives emotionally. Signs are if we talk more to our friends or a relative than to our partner or are disinterested in sex or spending time together.
Resentments easily develop in relationships especially when hurt or anger isn’t expressed. As a result, we may either pull away emotionally, put up walls, or push our partner away with criticism or undermining comments. Unexpressed hurt and needs lead to more disappointment and resentment.
Denial or shame about our feelings and needs usually stems from emotional abandonment in childhood and can cause intimacy problems. Usually, this fear isn’t conscious. In counseling, couples are able to talk about their ambivalence, which allows them to grow closer. Sometimes, abandoning behavior occurs after a period of closeness or sex. One partner may physically withdraw or create distance by not talking or even by talking too much. Either way, it may leave the other person feeling alone and abandoned.
In Childhood
Good parenting provides children security that they’re loved and accepted for their unique self by both parents and that both parents want a relationship with them. Parental failure to validate their feelings and needs is a trauma of emotional abandonment. Often clients tell me that they felt that their family didn’t understand them, that they felt different from the rest of the family or like an outsider. What is being described is the trauma of invisibility. This can also happen when parent-child interactions revolve around the parent, the child is serving the parent’s needs, instead of the other way around, which is a form of abandonment. Even if a parent says, “I love you,” the child may still not feel close and accepted for who he or she is as a separate individual, apart from the parent.
Emotional abandonment childhood can happen in infancy if the primary caretaker, usually the mother, is unable to be present emotionally for her baby. In addition to situations where a parent is physically absent or doesn’t share in parenting, abandonment happens later, too, when children are criticized, controlled, unfairly treated, or otherwise given a message that they or their experience is unimportant or wrong. Children are vulnerable, and it doesn’t take much for a child to feel hurt and “abandoned.”
A few incidents of emotional abandonment don’t harm a child’s healthy development, but when they’re common occurrences, they affect the child’s sense of self and security and can cause internalized shame that leads to intimacy issues and codependency in adult relationships. As adults, we may be emotionally unavailable or attracted to someone who is. We risk continuing a cycle of abandonment that replicates our abandoning relationships and is easily triggered to feel abandoned. For an in-depth examination of this process and how to heal. 
